French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy

Jay Gitlin, coeditor and contributor to French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy, asks, “What can historical scholarship best contribute to a moment of commemoration like the anniversary of the founding of a city?” (285) This volume and its contributors, who first gathered at a symposium to celebrate the 250th anniversary of St. Louis’s founding, aim to answer this question. Gitlin and his cocontributors argue that the role of historical scholarship in commemoration is not necessarily to debunk myths and obsessions with individual founders but to enliven perspectives that demonstrate the multiple contexts of St. Louis’s history. While limited to the expansion of French perspectives, the book successfully engages St. Louis from local, regional, national, and transnational levels as well as recentering the city in national narratives as a distinctive site whose French presence persisted beyond the Louisiana Purchase. By understanding the city’s French pasts within these wider contexts, present concerns and diverse audiences can be better understood.The monograph is divided into four sections that progress from discussions of the city’s colonial past to its present French community. Organizing the collection in this manner allows for a sufficient building of background knowledge while incorporating new perspectives that contribute to larger arguments about St. Louis’s importance within varied contexts. For example, part 1 provides analyses of St. Louis’s beginnings with particular attention to the importance of collaboration and alliance to the city’s founding decades. Chapters on political accommodation, women’s transcolonial networks, transitions in the fur trade, and the use of clothing in identity formation correct errors in traditional narratives by acknowledging the simultaneous existence of varied, overlapping experiences at St. Louis. However, more could be said about Indigenous perspectives as they relate to French narratives. This limitation is noted in the book’s conclusion, but the absence of more developed analysis throughout the text and the occasional use of language such as the “virgin soils of Native America” (81) crafts a distinctly Eurocentric perspective that undermines the overall argument for St. Louis’s wider significance within varied historical narratives. Despite this absence, the authors do provide a sense that the city was at the contact edge of multiple worlds—a theme that continues in part 2. Comparing St. Louis and New Orleans, chapters in this section describe differences in levels of industrialization and networks connecting communities of free people of color in the French Mississippi Corridor using the language of hinterlands, conduits, and barriers. This framing allows the authors to begin to intervene within borderlands studies in addition to providing necessary connections to wider geographies that supports the book’s recentering of the city within national narratives.As the book’s chronology continues to march into the present, parts 3 and 4 use new evidence to demonstrate French persistence beyond the Louisiana Purchase. Contributors in part 3 use new modeling technologies to recreate St. Louis’s early landscape for current scholars’ immersion and mine Pierre-Clément de Laussat’s previously overlooked personal papers to examine how colonial knowledge was gathered for administrative purposes. John H. Lawrence also suggests in this second chapter that Laussat’s papers provide a vision of St. Louis that lives on into the present. A similar sensibility appears in part 4. Examining the maintenance of St. Louis’s French connections, these final chapters use the publication of Revue de l’Ouest to argue for the continuance of an “esprit français” into the 1850s and a survey of the city’s current French community. In doing so, these sections link past and present, demonstrating why contributions from historical scholarship are important to current moments of commemoration as well as community development.While the city is not geographically central to the United States, the authors of French St. Louis successfully demonstrate its significance within multiple contexts and well beyond the signing of the Louisiana Purchase. Both French and American, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern—St. Louis is presented as a multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual city. Although more could be done in terms of its Indigenous connections, the book provides a comprehensive study of specifically French St. Louis in its multiple forms and iterations over time. Those interested in an overview of French empire in the Mississippi River region as well as the historian’s place in commemoration would benefit from reading this collection.

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